


Pizza Party

by intelcore



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: M/M, Post-The Tower of Nero (Trials of Apollo), The Tower of Nero (Trials of Apollo) Spoilers, hbd nico!, like mild mild vague spoilers, writing solangelo fic in 2021? local fic writer is full of surprises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:15:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29047509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intelcore/pseuds/intelcore
Summary: “I wasn’t sure you’d be up for a pizza date in the city.” Nico sat down on the empty bed, planted his feet on the ground. He had a huge box of pepperoni and cheese, two sodas. “So I brought the pizza date to you.”
Relationships: Nico di Angelo/Will Solace
Comments: 9
Kudos: 97





	Pizza Party

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Birthday Nico di Angelo!! 89? 15? Who knows!
> 
> Anyway, solangelo fic! I’m full of surprises! really tiny thing but I found it sweet how they apparently planned to go out into the city for pizza in TON, completely unheeding to the genre of fiction they’re stuck in. icons?

Nico found him in the infirmary.

It wasn’t like it was a difficult deduction. If Will was missing after a big battle, it was usually because he was stuck in the infirmary. Nico had given him space on the day they’d returned. Given him the next morning. Afternoon too.

But it was approaching evening now, and most of the campers who’d had to get looked at by healers were out of the infirmary. As disorganised and unexpected and brutal this battle had been, Camp Half Blood had managed to get out of it relatively unscathed. It hadn’t been like the Battle of the Labyrinth, or the fight they’d had with Gaea’s forces. It hadn’t been like Manhattan. Nico had helped splint broken bones and administered nectar, said soothing words to rattled newbies, but he had not had to perform funeral rites for a single soul. 

It didn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t have to in the future. Nico knew that. It had been a day and a half since they had come back from the battle, and it had been a day and a half since Apollo hadn’t.  
  


It was a grim thought.

Nico found Will stripping off his gloves, one knee resting on the bed for balance. The infirmary seemed quiet for the first time in nearly two days. He looked up when Nico approached.

“Hey, Nico—“ Will frowned. “Woah, what’s this?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d be up for a pizza date in the city.” Nico sat down on the empty bed, planted his feet on the ground. He had a huge box of pepperoni and cheese, two sodas. “So I brought the pizza date to you.”

When Will didn’t immediately move, Nico gestured at his own face, and then the food. “Uh, you’ve been stuck in the infirmary for two days. I just thought you’d like a snack? Soda? _A friendly face_? Someone once told me—“

Will snorted. “Thanks. That someone sounds like a visionary.” He smiled then, sweetly. “Really, though, thanks, Nico. I was starving.”

“Thought so.” He flipped open the lid. “Help yourself. It’s still warm.”

“You didn’t order a pizza here right? They get extremely lost. A couple of years ago there was this incident with this pizza guy, _whole_ mess—“

“Shadow travelled to Manhattan,” Nico said. “Cecil told me about the pizza guy. I was going to ask him to help me smuggle one in to camp, but the logistics of doing that without alerting the others? _Impossible_.”

“Oh, so this is special treatment?”

“This is a _date_. I told you already.”

Will looked extremely pleased. “Well, I love it.”

“This place isn’t a little dreary?”

“But I love dreary.”

Nico squinted at him. “Was that supposed to be a dig at me?”

“You’re not _dreary_ ,” Will said. “You’re _goth._ ” He took a bite out of the pizza and made an approving noise. “Oh, this is fantastic. Help yourself.”

Nico chose a piece for himself. Will smiled at him, then closed his eyes and flopped down on the bed next to him. He still looked to have an air of good humour, but he also looked bone tired. They ate in silence, companionable and comfortable.

Nico could see his boyfriend was wiped out. Nico felt wiped out too—he’d spent much of the last day and a half sleeping and recuperating enough energy after the day’s heroics. The voices had at least been drowned out by his fatigue.

As the silence stretched, Nico watched Will’s easy expression fall. He didn’t look sad exactly, just thoughtful, mind clearly a thousand miles away. Nico could feel the trepidation build slowly in his chest, but he didn’t push it. He just squeezed his hand.

“You fine?”

“Just tired.” Will _did_ look tired, but Nico could see that wasn’t all. “You?”

“Been better,” Nico said. “But I’ve been worse too, so.”

“That’s not really as comforting as you think.” Will picked at his food. “But, uh, good.”

“Did you get any message from your dad?”

“No,” Will said immediately. “The world’s still here though, so I guess it didn’t go completely south, but no message yet.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but caught himself at the last minute, eyes studying Nico. He looked like the Will at Council meetings, Will in the infirmary. Silent, dark, shrewd.

“Maybe—“ Nico began.

“Do you think he's dead?” Will asked, quietly. He wasn’t looking at Nico, but his voice was even. Calm.

Nico took a long sip of his Coke. It was flat, warm, generally the worst case scenario when it came to soda, but he needed to gather his thoughts. “You thought I felt your dad die and then just decided to buy you pizza?”

Something like a sheepish smile broke out on Will’s face. Faint, momentary, and then it was cloudy again. “Point. I guess if you’d felt—“ He shook his head. “I didn’t think you _felt_ it, to be clear. Just. Do you think he’s dead? Or do you think he went up to Olympus and just, er, didn’t tell us? Godly powers restored, and so are godly priorities?” The _do you think he forgot_ _about us_ lay an unspoken and terrible thing. 

“After everything, I don’t think he’d just...“ Nico trailed off. He wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence. Neither of the possibilities were easy to digest. The gods were shitty parents, but he didn’t think then being dead parents would be any better. Either way, they’d have to know, wouldn’t they? 

Will shrugged, head tilting to one side in acknowledgment. “Yeah.” He was quiet again. “Is it bad that both possibilities seem equally terrible to me?”

“Of course not,” Nico said. “They both _are_ terrible.”

“It’s just that I’m usually there,” Will said. He was still perfectly calm, perfectly composed, healer in a battle zone, head counsellor at the end of a massacre. “When people die. Like, I know. For sure. I’m there. I saw Lee…well, I wish I _hadn’t_ seen Lee, there wasn’t much of Lee as much as there was—blood and brains. But I saw him when he went down with that giant’s club. I didn’t see Michael after, but I saw the, um, I saw the bridge. Blow up. And I thought that nothing could be worse than that, that it would be better not to—“ Will broke off. He wasn’t crying or anything, and his voice didn’t waver, but he was frowning, hard.

“This sucks in a whole other way,” Will finished at last. He leaned back and tipping his head back to study the cracks in the ceiling. “I don’t know...it’s just. Some sort of closure. In being there.”

Nico drew his legs up and crossed them. The big toe of his right foot was painted a shimmery black, courtesy of Rachel Dare. The nail paint was chipping off already, but Nico found that he had quite liked it. It looked cool. Valentina had called it “emo chic”, whatever that meant.

Nico scratched the paint with his fingernail. The black stuff scraped and settled under the nail bed, and Nico focused on that uncomfortable sensation and—and nothing else. He tried to focus on that sensation, and the warmth of Will, the flat, sweet taste of soda. He tried to focus on the memory of Rachel rolling her eyes as Nico pulled his foot away from her, going _thanks Rachel, but I changed my mind, one toe is fine,_ and how he had grown to like it later on, had thought he would ask her if he could borrow the bottle, maybe the green too, the one which glowed in the dark. He tried to think about that and nothing else. He had discovered that he could stay in the moment if he focused on the little stuff, the things like touch and sound and smell of every day camp life. It helped ground him.

He didn’t want to think about closure, or the lack of it. About _being there_ . He didn’t want to think about jerking awake in the middle of the night, cold sweat and hollow howling in his ears. He would start to think about the cold, dreary tunnels of the Labyrinth, only a dead king for company, wishing and wishing and wishing _Bianca talk to me, Bianca please come back, I am the prince of the Underworld I order you to tell me, please talk to me please please please._ It made him think of the days he had tolerated being called soft and dense by someone who wished it was Bianca here instead of him, just for a morsel, a scrap of information about Maria di Angelo, a scrap of affection from someone who was supposed to be his father. It made him think of Jason, and how alive he had looked when Nico had last seen him, and how he had not seen him again.

Not knowing was a knife that had torn Nico’s years up into dark, formless expanses of dead time. He wasn’t sure if being there was really any better—it couldn’t have been, really, not in a hundred years—but sometimes the uncertainty was what drove you mad.

He pushed down his thoughts, and turned to look at Will to—he didn’t even know, comfort? Commiserate?—and found Will already looking at him, expression unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” Will said.

Nico blinked, confused. “Uh, what?”

Will raised a shoulder, face turning away oh-so-slightly, a fraction of a moment that spoke volumes. He didn’t meet his eyes. “I was just…it can’t have been easy for you. With your sister. Jason. That you weren’t there in the end.“

For a moment, Nico just sat there, feeling soft and dense and noiseless inside. Had he said it out loud? But he could see by Will’s expression that he hadn’t. He’d come to the conclusion on his own. “Oh,” Nico said. He blinked again. “ _Oh._ Will—“ Again he found he didn’t know how to complete the sentence. Finally he just exhaled slowly and closed his eyes. “Yeah. It sucks.”

Nico could almost _feel_ the weight of Will’s hesitation.

He opened his eyes to look at his boyfriend. Will looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. “What?”

“You’re going to Tartarus,” Will said. It wasn’t a question. “To help your Bob friend. After everything, you can’t bear leaving him behind. Not knowing. You’re going back down there, aren’t you? No matter what Mr D is going to say—you’re going. Mind’s made up.”

Nico thought about it for all of one second. “Yes.” When Will didn't immediately say anything, it was a familiar tiredness that chilled Nico’s bones. “Look, I know it’s dangerous. It’s reckless, it’s stupid, it’s—heck, it’s even _arrogant—_ “

“Can I come with you?” Will asked. He was quiet, but more than that he was unsure, unsure in a way he never was. “Please. Can I come with you?”

“Will—“ He had offered before this, of course he had, and Nico had said _okay, we’ll think about it, we’ll see, I’m not sure if_ I’m _going in the first place_ , but now he saw how dumb those words had been. Of course Nico was always going to go. Of course Will was always going to follow him.

“Not knowing is going to be so much more worse,” Will said. 

“Okay,” Nico said. “Okay. It’s going to be dangerous. It’s going to be _stupid_ dangerous. But okay.”

“I love you,” Will said, and it sounded more serious, more matter of fact than anything he’d said before. “I love you, you know that right?”

“I know. I love you too.” Nico bit his lip. “Tartarus...gods, Will, Tartarus is not—it’s not a _good_ idea, in any way.”

Will smiled grimly. “I know. It’s totally bonkers. But I know you’re going to do it. And I know I’m going to come with you. We’ll figure it out.”

“It’s not going to be easy.”

“I don’t have any delusions about that.”

Nico nodded. There was usually something uncomfortable and hollow in his stomach at the mention of Tartarus, but strangely enough, he felt more solid about the idea than he had before. It wasn’t even—scary as the idea was—the wonderful notion of not having to do it alone but with his boyfriend, even though that certainly didn’t hurt.

It just felt good to have someone back up his ideas for once, to plan and promise and make a roadmap on how to deal with it instead of shutting him off or viewing him as incapable, untrustworthy.

Will took a deep breath. His smile was still grim, but his gaze, though steely, was hopeful, a good few degrees less grim. Nico felt better too, and he allowed himself to smile. 

“It’s a date then,” Nico said. 

Will laughed at that, a surprised, bright laugh. He shook his head fondly and raised a pizza slice in a mock salute. “It’s a date.” He paused. “I guess I’ll be bringing a lot of KitKats?”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! I’m @seavoice on tumblr if you want to say hi!


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